#I had so much fun doing this chapter agsdhjasg

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“Clóda,” one stone. 

“Clóda,” another. 

“Fuck sake,” I murmur to myself, then throw a third, bigger one, which smacks off her window so loudly that I’m briefly paralysed with fear that it has broken the glass. Thankfully it hasn’t. She comes out onto the balcony.

“There you are,” she says quietly, peering down at me in her garden as I drop my handful of stones and wipe the dirt on my thighs. 

“Yeah, here I am. This is a bit Shakespearean isn’t it?” 

“Huh?”

“Like, you know, 'but soft, what light through yonder window breaks…. Defy thy father, refuse thy name', et cetera,” I pause before clarifying, “Romeo and Juliet, no?”

“Oh, I did The Merchant of Venice for my Junior Cert.”

“I thought you’d have still gotten the reference.”

She leans over the balcony to point to a precarious looking trellis against the wall, “If you climb up that thing you’ll be able to reach me.”

“Right,” I say, and press my foot against the flimsy timber to test my weight, “You know I’m like, nearly thirteen stone?” 

“You can try.”

“And if I break it?”

“Hmm, try not to,” she suggests. 

“Right,” I brace myself by slotting my fingers into a gap between some brick facade on the side of the house and I haul myself onto the trellis, and it groans but doesn’t give. “I’m good, I think I’m good.”

From there it’s not so bad. I nimbly move up the wall, grab hold of the sun room gutters and grab a hold of the balcony railings, where I find myself thrilled in the way a child is, having climbed somewhere he is not supposed to climb, the king of the castle overlooking his vast land, though I can’t really see much in the dark countryside, save a few car headlights in the distance, the lighthouse flashing over the bay. 

“Um, here,” Clóda hisses, and I realise I have briefly forgotten my objective, but the rest is easy, I just swing myself over the railing and I’m up. 

“Nice that you’ve a balcony,” I comment, “I don't know many other people who have one of these.”

“We built this house a few years ago, and for some reason I wanted a balcony in my room, I don’t know, I was like, ten, and it was a stupid idea because it’s mostly too cold out here to even make use of.” 

“Useful now though, huh?” 

She tucks her hair behind her ears and bats her eyelashes at me, “yeah I suppose it is.”

She pushes the door open and we creep into her room where the only light is from the glow of the television screen in the corner. It’s clean, very clean with no clutter or clothes lying around, which always freaks me out for reasons that I cannot explain. The idea that a person would have the interest or discipline to keep their bedroom clean is odd. If a person's bedroom is a mirror to the inside of their mind, then the lack of chaos in hers is foreign and unrelatable. 

While she switches on a pink fringed bedside light I throw myself down on the neatly tucked duvet just so that I can mess it up a little bit, to mark my territory like some kind of wild dog let loose in a palace. I peer at her CD collection and mess that up too by pulling one out and showing it to her, “Jesse McCartney, huh? You a fan?”

She goes pink and grabs it out of my hand, “Yeah I used to be, I dunno, not so much anymore, I don’t know why I still have that.”

I grab another, “Who are the Jonas Brothers?” 

“Oh, they’re-”

“That guy in the middle has a pretty wild haircut, would you fancy me with that?”

“No,” she giggles and takes that CD off me too, then slots them carefully back where they were, “I have some silly stuff, I probably shouldn’t have it all out.”

“Nah, well, look, you have some great stuff here, how ‘bout this? Black Holes and Revelations? I love this album, you know I saw Muse live last year.”

The mattress sinks as she sits next to me, “Really? Was it when they came to Ireland?”

“Nah it was in the states.”

Her eyes flash with intrigue, “like, America?”

“Mm, yeah.”

“That’s so cool.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, that you just, like, go to America and stuff. I don’t know anybody who’s gone to America yet, and I want to go so badly.”

I shrug, “well you should, then.”

“How often do you go?”

“Not often, I was there last year and then before that…” I try to remember, “I think I was maybe twelve. It takes a long time to get to where I’m going, you know, from here you can only get to New York and then you have to get a connecting flight and all of that,” thinking about the ordeal of it exhausts me, but Clóda is leaning forward in fascination, as hearing the words ‘New York’ come out of my mouth has sent a thrill through her. 

“What do you go for?”

“Just to visit family and stuff.”

“You’ve family there?”

“Of course, did you not know that my dad is American?”

She frowns, “Well you sound a little bit American but I thought… I don’t know, really, I thought you were putting it on or something.”

“What, like, for attention?”

“I don’t know,” she shakes her head, impatient, “where do you go?”

“Well… I’ve some family in California and some in New Mexico, which is like, a state in the southwest, kinda wedged between Texas and California, if you can imagine that on a map,” I leave out poor Arizona just to make it easier on her, because nobody here knows what the hell a New Mexico, (‘no, no not Mexico, New Mexico’) is so it’s best to keep it concise. 

Clóda is nodding vigorously, “California, like, LA.”

“Kind of. Like, my dad comes from a place called San Bernardino, which is-” I take her wrist and trace a line on the soft skin of her inner arm, “-to the east of LA, say, an hour or two away, depending on the traffic, yeah? And then his family, like his aunts and uncles and their parents, who we used to visit sometimes, they’re living in a place way up north,” I run a gentle trail all the way up to the sleeve of her t-shirt, “to the very tip top of the Sacramento valley in this rugged, gold rush town…” I lift my eyes to her and she’s staring at my hand, following the motion of my finger as I skim the tip of it over her shoulder and across the taut skin of her collarbone. I prepare myself to say more sexy things about the Sacramento river and the rolling hills and the central valley and whatever else I usually bang on about whenever someone asks, but she looks into my eyes and says: “Is there an Abercrombie where you go?”

“Huh?”

“Abercrombie and Fitch.”

I frown, “Yeah?”

“Oh, wow.” She pushes me onto my back and lays on top of me, gazing down at me with fervid glitter in her eyes, “If you go back to America this year, could you buy me something from there?”

I search in her eyes for some sign that she’s joking and determine that she isn’t. She really wants me to do that. “Yep, sure,” I say.

“Ah, that’d be amazing. You know the way they have those bags too? The ones with the black and white pictures of the guys' bodies on them? Well there was a girl in my class who…”

And I zone out and I stop listening to her as she talks about laminating the bags and carrying school books in them, and I wonder if she will even notice the glazed over look in my eyes as I let my eyes unfocus and stare into the middle distance between her and her pastel pink walls and ask myself some serious questions. 

Do I like her?

She’s pretty though.

Sure, she’s pretty but is she fun? 

She likes Muse.

She’s not even very nice though, is she? She’s said a few weird things in the past.

Yeah but I’ve had sex with her now.

I can’t really stop talking to her or anything, can I? That’d mean I’m a dickhead. 

But would I rather be a dickhead or be miserable?

Maybe both outcomes will make me miserable. Maybe I’m just pre-programmed to be a miserable person. Or am I just cursed?

I zone back in for a moment, “...and then Mr. Brennan confiscated all of them, and there was this whole thing where the parents council…” What is happening? 

“Uh huh,” I say, “Uh huh… uh huh, what? That’s crazy,” God she is really pretty though, the kind of pretty that’s hard to find, and it’s not like there’s anyone else around, is there? It’d be awkward to stop seeing each other now with two whole weeks left of the summer. 

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